He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Review

We finally got it.

It's been decades and several iterations of this character and his story through comics, animated shows, and different toy lines, but we have a new He-Man live-action film. It's been many things over many years, which begs the question: did this movie, in the midst of all of that, know what it wanted to be?

What's up, guys? My name is Brett Krispy, and this is my review of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. It’s the second live-action He-Man adaptation. A great leader in the making is exiled from his home after its throne is usurped by a villain who proceeds to ruin it and everything it stands for. Knowing deep down who he is and remembering where he came from, he eventually has to accept the great destiny thrust upon him and return home to save everything and everyone from destruction.

Wait, sorry. That's the plot of The Lion King. Let me redo this. A great leader in the making is exiled from his home after its throne is usurped by a villain who proceeds to ruin it and everything it stands for. Knowing deep down who he is and remembering where he came from, he eventually has to accept the great destiny thrust upon him and return home to save everything and everyone from destruction.

This movie's got a bit of a history. Over the last two decades, it's been passed around between studios like the taxpayer whenever we get on a phone call with the IRS and you can feel it.

Starting off with a positive, the opening of this movie is incredible. We start off in Eternia, this awesome magical planet that needs saving, which makes you care about it. The Lord of Evil, Skeletor, comes in to conquer, and he feels like this incredible looming force that comes in to completely change the game. It hooked me immediately. Amazing introduction to an amazing world.

Then we get to Earth. Lame, boring, irritating, anxiety-inducing, stupid Earth. This is where things really slow down. I love good improv comedy as much as the next guy, but this isn't it. The whole time Prince Adam is on Earth was such a drag. I had nothing on my mind but, can we please go back to Eternia now?

Good news: we do get back to Eternia. The bad news: they don't stop the comedy. For me, the humor is where the whole thing collapses in on itself. It's that specific brand of comedy where every sentence of dialogue has to wink at you at gunpoint.

By the time that MCU bathos bullshit got old, I was too young to drink legally and this movie doesn’t trust itself to exist without it for one moment.

What we get is a movie that keeps trying to tell us that we're having a good time but doesn't actually know how to show us a good time most of the time. In fact, I found myself constantly checking the time in my seat. It’s mostly and I could count the non-Skeletor ones that actually got me on one hand with enough fingers left over to flip one.

What makes it even more heartbreaking is that there are moments of genuine heart in this movie, and they’re great. But most of the time, when they're onto something, when you're really starting to feel it, they ruin the whole thing with a cheap joke. The heroes will start a slow, chin-up walk toward the final fight, the score swelling, and you'll feel it for exactly four seconds before someone needs to cough on smoke or miss a dramatic cue on purpose. Careful, mates; if it senses investment, it panics.

I'm going to take a break from being mean here for a second to give this movie some props where it's due. For the most part, the cast is absolutely locked in and on point.

Nicholas Galitzine's He-Man is fine… I guess. I mean, he's clearly doing the best with what he's given. In the writers’ defense, He-Man is a tough character to write for. Historically, he's always kind of suffered from the classic Superman problem. When you have a main character who's this powerful, how do you really put him through struggle? I don't fault this movie's writing for not quite rising up to that, but all the same, it is a problem that gives Galitzine a tough thing to work with.

Again, though, he really is as good as you can get with what he's given. They go the himbo route with his character, and he does it extremely well. But where more problems start up is where the movie completely fails to distinguish Prince Adam from He-Man. It becomes laughable whenever they treat him like he's weak, like he can barely keep up in a run when the guy is clearly built. We're all supposed to be shocked when he suddenly gets the He-Man physique, but when he transformed, I was like, yeah, no. That checks out with what he's been hiding under those shirts this whole time.

I get not wanting to CGI him into that Captain America: First Avenger skinny Ken doll body, and I know you can't exactly pause production so your lead can do a rushed set of curls between takes, but no version of baggy shirts was ever going to sell me on "this man is secretly not built."

Then we have Idris Elba, one of the coolest actors in Hollywood, playing Man-at-Arms. As you might expect, he's one of the best things about the movie. He's almost like the Alfred to He-Man's Batman in this movie. And like Alfred, he somehow always has a big elaborate speech, but Idris Elba’s delivery is the difference maker; not an easy thing, outacting Michael Caine.

For what it's worth, he also has really good lessons to teach He-Man, lessons that are applicable in real life. The problem, and unfortunately it's a big one, is that in the first act of the movie, he loses once and, in his defense badly. He loses a fight and fails to protect Eternia and the royal family; he fails the duty he was trained for. But for the rest of this film, he's just this washed-up, burnout drunk who Teela has to do all of the work for. It creates this tension between them that, even though the movie tries to tell us everything's all hunky-dory by the end, I didn't really buy it. He lets himself go in a way that makes the character feel weak and his comeback…doesn’t feel very comebacky. Still, that doesn't take away from Idris Elba giving one of the best performances in the movie. The keywords being "one of," because the standout performance in this movie is definitely Jared Leto as Skeletor.

You see what you're doing, movie? You're making me say good things about Jared Leto. Seriously though, the man nails this character. I was worried at first that we'd have to put up with him just being Kel Dorf through most of the movie, with like three-fourths of the film being his origin story. But no, he's Skeletor right from the start, right from where he pulls the hood off. He has this really cool Tim Curry-as-Bane thing going on with his voice, as Dan Murrell described it, and he unironically has all the best jokes in the film.

It's a great performance… that like Idris Elba’s, is interfered with by a problematic screenplay. The movie can't seem to decide whether or not it wants him to be a serious threat or a joke.

Compare him with some Disney villains like Captain Hook, who managed to combine menacing, cool, and pathetic in very unique and organic ways, where they still feel like the same character and the same villain throughout. I feel like they're trying to hit that balance with Skeletor here. It's ambitious, and I respect that. But where they fumble is in making it feel like the same character.

You'll have some moments where he's a menacing villain, other moments where he's a mustache-twirling, snidely whiplash type with a dry sense of humor, and then other moments where he feels less like Skeletor and more like a deliberately pathetic parody of Skeletor. There's a lack of cohesion and congruence at work that makes Skeletor feel less like a character and more like a flat caricature who's just whatever the script needs him to be at the time. The Frank Langella performance he ain't, and if you're hoping for anything like the dynamic that he and Dolph Lundgren managed to nail in what was otherwise a mess of a film, abandon all hope, ye who enter that streaming service or pirating site, whatever y'all are going to do to see this movie.

As for Alison Brie as Evil Lyn, it gives me no pleasure to say this. I love Alison Brie. As far as performances go, she is the weak link in this cast. I honestly can't tell if my problem is with her performance or the fact that they just gave her character nothing to do in the movie. She's literally just there to make jokes while standing next to Skeletor, and that's it. Skeletor straight up manhandles her at least twice in the movie, and yet she does nothing to even try to betray him or hint at ulterior motives. You don't even have to have her do that; just give her something to do or make her more menacing. She's the overlord of evil's right-hand woman, you've got Alison Brie playing that role, and this is all you do with her?

Also, this movie doesn't know what it wants to be, mainly with how it handles its roots as a cartoon-based adaptation. A big part of that problem is the way they handle the characters’ names. You've got guys like Skeletor, Man-at-Arms, and Evil Lyn, who play the names straight, and then you've got Ram Man and Fisto, whose whole deal is not even having names. That's right; they don't even have names. He-Man barely remembered them from when he was a kid, so he just made drawings of them and came up with names for them. They become their names in the movie, and they don't even really try to debate it. It's like, "Yeah, that's your name now. Your name is Fisto, and you will wear it with pride. CRACK"

Oh, and that's another thing about Fisto. Pretty much any joke you can think of with that name, they use it every single second he's on screen, and it's as annoying as it sounds. Prince Adam always talks about how he's embarrassed that he came up with those names.

Cutting some slack where it's due, the CGI is great. It looks unfinished, like they rushed it in the name of a deadline, but it looks like a really good unfinished project—none of that better-than-the-Flash-movie stuff anyway. The colors are bright and dynamic, and the style is fittingly cartoonish, so the pros outweigh the cons for the CGI. The practical effects are incredible too. Trap Jaw is done with practical makeup, and he looks amazing, which makes sense given Travis Knight's stop-motion background. I'm glad he got to let that muscle flex a little.

Speaking of the colors, Eternia looks amazing; again, it’s bright and dynamic, and it looks magical in all the best ways. Except for Skeletor's throne room. Remember how Frank Langella's Skeletor's throne room looked like a mini castle? They tossed it out for a broke studio apartment Skeletor with this place. You're the overlord of evil, buddy; you can do better than this.

Jared Leto as Skeletor may be the best performance in the movie, but he falls just short of being the MVP. That would be the score by Daniel Pemberton. If the awesome guitar they bring to the movie sounds familiar, it's because they brought in Brian May from Queen. You won't just hear it; you'll feel it. I had to spot him in the credits and confirm it with Leo (Brave supremacy). Amazing is an understatement, though. The 80s sci-fi fantasy vibe that he captures on the guitar is unparalleled. We've all seen cinema try to capture it, but what Brian May does on the guitar is unmatched. Again, goated score.

This movie's too long. It clocks in at two hours and twelve minutes. It drags on, and what sucks about that is it could have been easily avoided. Shave the part on Earth, lose the subplot where Man-at-Arms becomes a drunk burnout for some reason, and for the love of God, get rid of the MCU humor. This movie had four writers on the screenplay, four writers on the story, and you don't have to see that in the credits to feel it draining on your soul as you watch the movie.

This doesn't feel written so much as assembled. Like four people were handed the same mood board and a deadline and told to never once be in the same room. You can taste the committee. It feels like it had people behind it with varying degrees of passion and different ideas about what Masters of the Universe could be and should be, and they just sort of amalgamated it into this one incohesive mess of a thing that's anything but fresh and new.

Going back to the names, Adam also reveals at the end that he came up with the name He-Man for himself, and he's embarrassed about that too. The original He-Man cartoon had a lot of camp, but that camp came with heart. You might as well embrace it, and there are moments where the movie does that, and those moments are some of the best in the film. But most of the time, it leans into it not for the heart but just for those lame jokes that we should have banished to the shadow realm in the 2010s.

When it's not leaning into the camp for the sake of the jokes, it's leaning away from it, acting like it's embarrassed by the camp, like it's embarrassed to be a He-Man property, much like those Resident Evil movies feel embarrassed to represent their IP.

If I wish that this movie were more like any other project, I wish it were more like Netflix's adaptation of One Piece. The One Piece Netflix adaptation embraces the corniness. It embraces the energy of its source material, but that means it also embraces its heart and everything that makes the story and the characters so special.

This feels more like a parody of the source material, and if you go in expecting a parody, I think you'll like the movie at least more than I did. I can't remember which critic said it, but I think it was Jeremy Jahns. Going off of that review, this film really is one Jack Black away from being a half-assed blockbuster, give-me-money schlock slop. I really hope I don't sound like I'm being too mean to this movie because while I didn't like most of it, what I did like about it, I loved.

I loved the score. I loved Eternia. I loved the opening. I loved the Jared Leto performance. I loved the Idris Elba performance…when they gave the guy dignity. I loved the moments of actual bona fide heart we got, and I loved when the movie slowed down to focus on some life lessons; I loved those parts too. But those moments get ruined by the movie's need to have a joke every thirty seconds, and it makes the movie feel like this ridiculous mess.

They had the cast. They had the look. They had the design. They had the makings of a great He-Man movie. But clearly, the rewrites watered it down because it felt like priority number one was playing it safe. I hate that. I hate the death of risk-taking. It looks like He-Man, but it doesn’t feel like He-Man. Again, the movie is not terrible, but it's far from great too.

We don't necessarily, wink wink, push drugs and alcohol here, but if you got them, you'll have more fun. Bring them in with the bag of buttered popcorn. With this movie, you might as well do what you gotta do to treat yourself. I know people who had a good time with this movie. But hey, I just turned 30. Maybe it comes with age.

6.5 out of 10.